Gordon Campbell on child poverty

Gordon Campbell on child poverty

Last night, if you missed Bryan Bruce’s
brilliant TV3 documentary on child poverty in New
Zealand –or would like your relatives and friends to see
it – the relevant link is here.

What Bruce
simply and clearly demonstrated was that the diseases of
poverty are preventable. Moreover Bruce showed them to be
the products of a market ideology that has failed most New
Zealanders, and is now blighting the lives of hundreds of
thousands of this nation’s children.

Diseases that all
but vanished from Europe decades ago are now rife in parts
of this country – and only the state can fix the problem.
Just as it always has done in New Zealand, from the 1930s
onwards.

As Bruce shows, a range of supportive measures
(some of which used to be available in New Zealand) have
been central to the success of countries that he visited,
such as Sweden. These measures include children’s food
programmes at school, comprehensive state assistance to
assist poorer families into quality housing, free 24 hour
access to GPs for children, enlightened policies on paid
parental leave etc etc.

The outcomes prove his point.
Sweden has all but eradicated certain diseases of poverty
among its children, while in New Zealand preventable
illnesses such as rheumatic fever, respiratory diseases and
skin sores are rife, largely due to the poor, overcrowded
conditions in which people are being forced to live, in
houses which they cannot afford to heat adequately.

Are
the solutions affordable? Leaving aside our over-riding duty
of care to the children involved, treating these diseases
once they have taken hold is far more costly than taking the
preventive actions to eradicate the disease in the first
place. There is always an alternative. It just comes down to
what the priorities are seen to be.

The costs of what
would make a significant difference are minimal. In
September 2009, the Child Poverty Action Group estimated
[PDF] that the cost of a breakfast-in-schools programme
within all of our one to three decile schools would be $36
million. The current government spent 50 times that amount
on bailing out the investors in South Canterbury Finance. It
also chose to cut the tax revenues that could have funded
programmes to assist the families of the poor, and gave that
money disproportionately to the wealthy.

In his
programme, Bruce advocated putting politics to one aide, and
creating a multi-party framework to address child poverty,
something akin to the multi-party accord that we negotiated
in the early 1990s to resolve the issues facing national
superannuation. The partisan ugliness of Social Development
Minister Paula Bennett’s response in Parliament to the
recent recommendations by the Child Poverty Action Group
shows just how far we are from taking such a sensible step.

Within National’s second term, the plans for reform
will extend a welfare bashing approach to the problems of
child poverty. From Bruce’s evidence, these reforms will
require more solo parents to leave sick children at home.
They will also have to cut back on heating, food and GP
visits to pay for such things as transport, as they chase
non-existent jobs in order to continue to qualify for a
benefit. The real victim of this short sighted, punitive
policy will be the children – who will continue to be
punished because of the employment status of their parents.

Going into this election, the Greens seem to have
fashioned the most co-ordinated policy package to address
the problems that Bruce has highlighted. Their approach has
four related components:

1.
Working for Families has to be made available to every
low-income family, regardless of whether they are in paid
work or notCurrently, to provide an incentive
to work, New Zealand makes WFF available to the working
poor, but not to the beneficiary poor. This may make some
sense when jobs are plentiful – but it makes no sense at
all and becomes punitive and socially damaging during a
recession. Currently, tens of thousands of New Zealand
children are being made to suffer extreme hardship through
no fault of their own, but merely because of the success
and/or luck of their parents in finding paid work. Under the
Greens plan, the extension of WFF would provide an extra $60
per week to 140,000 of the poorest households in New
Zealand.

2. Provide better study support for sole
parents and beneficiariesAs both Labour and the
Greens have pointed out, there used to be support for sole
parents to study at university, and it was a successful
programme : parents moved off the benefit some six months
earlier and went into higher paying jobs. That scheme has
been axed by National. Labour and the Greens have pledged to
re-instate and extend this support which – the Greens
estimate – would help 10,000 people get a higher education
and take better care of their kids.

3. Raise the
minimum wage to help working parentsThis is not
merely a matter – as John Key argued in the TV3 debate on
Monday night – of creating wealth by the stroke of a pen.
It involves a fairer distribution of existing wealth. Some
minimum wage workers are employed for instance, in aged care
– a sector that is bound to grow as the population ages.
These workers care for our elderly. They wash them, feed
them and sit with them when they are dying. Many of them get
paid only at or near the minimum wage, while foreign
investors in this sector take significant profits out of the
country. Many of these workers are also solo parents. By
raising the minimum wage to $15 immediately, these working
parents would be better able to meet the essential needs of
their children. Again, the Greens estimate this change would
be worth about $60 more per week for someone working full
time on the minimum wage.

4. Make sure rental
properties are warm and healthy for kidsAs
Bruce pointed out in his documentary, we have warrant of
fitness standards for our cars, to ensure that vehicles will
not be a safety menace to those on the roads. Yet we don’t
have similar regulations for our houses. A working toilet, a
sink and a wall socket is about all that landlords are
required by law to provide, before being able to make money
from renting out their properties.

As a result, hundreds
of thousands of New Zealand children live in cold, damp
houses which make them sick. The footage in Bruce’s
documentary of the rampant mould in the houses that he
visited was really appalling. Besides the pain that the
children affected are experiencing, there are subsequent
costs to the health system that are entirely preventable –
if there was a willingness in government to impose a minimal
code of performance standards for our housing stock, and to
provide enhanced funding for the home insulation programme.
Next year, the existing programme may well have to compete
with the Christchurch rebuild for tradespeople with the
necessary skills.

All up, the Greens estimate that such a
comprehensive programme “would cost “approximately $360
million per year for the next three years - less than 0.3
percent of GDP.” Personally, I’d add in the
meals-at-schools programme advocated in 2009 by the Child
Poverty Action Group, and fund it initially at around $50
million a year, for a grand total of $410 million. Not much
at all. Not in a context where we are spending some $29
billion on the nation’s roads. It seems like a pipe dream
though, given the current political climate where Paula
Bennett and her expert advisors in the Welfare Working Group
are placing such little value on the task of parenting. Solo
parenting ? They intend to make it harder.

Even if we
feel pretty lukewarm about the options facing us on
Saturday, perhaps we should be thinking of casting a vote to
better protect the children in this country who are most at
risk. From economic conditions, and from the policies and
priorities currently in place.

In response to the challenges facing Scoop and the media industry we’ve instituted an Ethical Paywall to keep the news freely available to the public.
People who use Scoop for work need to be licensed through a ScoopPro subscription under this model, they also get access to exclusive news tools.

So, what happens next? Normally when a major policy like this gets so crushingly rejected – by 230 votes, when Theresa May had reportedly been hoping for a defeat by “only” 70- 100 votes – the PM would resign and/or a fresh election called. More>>

For the past 100 years, the West has sold out the Kurds over and over again. So much so that it came as a surprise yesterday when US National Security advisor John Bolton appeared to walk back the latest act of betrayal... More>>

ALSO:

What do you call a situation where the state tries to create panic among its own people for party political gain? As practiced by Theresa May and her faction of the Conservative Party, this has become a well-honed form of state terrorism… More>>

2018 has been quite a year for Scoop. We are so thrilled to have successfully met the funding target for the first stage of the ‘Scoop 3.0’ plan raising $36,000. This means we can now proceed with the planning phase for the delivery of this bold vision for a community-owned, participatory, independent newsroom... More>>